Flathead Audubon and Montana Audubon to co-host bird fest

Flathead Audubon will co-host the annual Montana Audubon Wings Across the Big Sky bird festival in Kalispell on June 8-10. The festival will be headquartered at the Hilton Garden Inn.

The festival celebrates the area’s ecological diversity and abundance of birdlife with 27 guided field trips to the area’s shrublands, wetlands, grasslands and forests on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Led by ornithologists and local bird experts, the birding trips include tours of national wildlife refuges in the Flathead and Mission valleys, among them Swan River, Pablo, Ninepipe and Lost Trail, as well as the National Bison Range.

The festival also includes trips to Glacier National Park, in search of the beautiful Harlequin duck.

“We chose the Flathead Valley as the site of this year’s bird festival because the area holds a vast range of habitats and endless opportunities to see a myriad of different species and discuss the many conservation challenges,” says Steve Hoffman, executive director of Montana Audubon. These habitats and some of the bird species of the Flathead are featured in a painting by Bigfork artist Brett Thuma for festival materials. The painting will be auctioned during the festival.

The festival theme “Birding and Conservation: The Crown of the Continent,” will feature top-notch experts and speakers. Delivering the keynote address is Peter Sherrington, founder and research director of the Rocky Mountain Eagle Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of migrant and resident eagles in the mountains of western Canada. Several years ago Sherrington, a geologist and paleontologist, gave up a career in the oil and gas industry to study and protect golden eagles and their habitat. The title of his address is “Twenty Years of Golden Eagle Migration Studies in the Alberta Rockies: The Big Picture Begins to Emerge.”

“Peter is a giant in the field of raptor study and conservation along the Rockies,” Hoffman says. “I fully expect he’ll give a talk that shines a very illuminating light on the migration of eagles in Montana and Alberta.”

The festival features, in addition to Sherrington, seven other authorities in their fields delivering talks on topics such as nesting colonial water birds, raptor migration across Montana, bats in Glacier National Park and children’s connection to nature.

Brian Sullivan of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology will also provide an introduction to eBird (eBird.org), a website that allows users to log their bird sightings and share their logs with other users-all for the good of science and bird conservation.

In addition to the field trips and talks, the festival offers three pre-festival workshops, all on Friday, June 8. One looks at how to offer bird education training in your community. Another examines private landowner conservation efforts in Flathead Valley. The third explores the complex regional forest and wildlife conservation issues that have emerged in the face of climate change and related threats to the health of the natural landscape.

“Both seasoned and beginning birders, including children, should find plenty to intrigue them at this year’s festival,” Hoffman says.

For more information and to register for the event, visit www.mtaudu bon.org/birdwatching/festival or call 443-3949. Special room rates at the Hilton Garden Inn have been arranged for attendees.